We have a purchasing database for our buyers to look over stock and other items to help with their job function. However, as a manager I mostly spend my time in the Sales Database to work with my sales team and feel that I should start setting up a dashboard for KPI on the purchasers themselves. How are you using Phocas to manage your purchasing department and judge performance?

DIFOT (Delivered in full, on time) and OTD (On-time delivery) are the big ones for us. We also use it to forecast rolling 12 month purchases as we have a purchase order stream within our purchase database.

I setup for our purchasing manager 4 monthly favourites that I subscribed him to, so that he can take the data dump it into a spreadsheet and produce our monthly purchasing report which shows our forecasted purchasing against our forecasted sales from back orders and current vs. previous month stock balances.

We look at fill rate out of our DC and GMROI as our main KPI’s to evaluate the effectiveness of our stocking strategy. Buyers are part of that discussion as is the Inventory Control Department and Branch Management.

Yes this is helpful and I will look and creating some similar favorites to see how they work for us. Which system are you running for your ERP? We are eclipse users and find it difficult to track DIFOT (Delivered in full, on time) and OTD (On-time delivery) from that system. Can you elaborate on that aspect with respect to Phocas (if you are even using this system for that metric).

For DIFOT and OTD, we are just comparing our actual receipt dates vs our expected receipt dates which Pronto allows us to capture easily on the PO.

The one challenge we had which SlideRule helped us overcome was that our expected receipt date can be altered, so on creation of PO we now capture the Original Expected Receipt date in a table outside of Pronto and Phocas shows this date as well as the Pronto date which it tags as Final so we can compare, original vs final vs actual which is important for us.

We use GMROI out of Eclipse, we weren’t able to get GMROI to work correctly out of Phocas. Fill rate reports in Eclipse are not super accurate depending on how you use shipping statuses. We had a company called Ponderosa do a modification that captures inventory levels daily. That got much closer to a true fill rate. Wish Phocas could extract inventory levels daily through the Ponderosa Data. I believe the average inventory levels in Phocas are based off a monthly snapshot.

We use Phocas to track trends for purchasing more often. Here are some examples:

“Items Gone Cold” Report: Stock Items with over $500 in Sales in R12 and less than $5 in current and previous month.

“QTY Up” Report: Current and Last Month Qty > Previous 6 month Qty by at least 5. It has a Diff and %Diff built in. Helps prevent stock outs.